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“... When Gianni de Michelis, then Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Italy, attended a semi-official Nato anniversary conference organised by Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and held with some formality at the Palais d’Enghien in Brussels, he was accompanied by a handsome blonde with unspecified duties on the state-owned ENI or possibly the Socialist Party of Italy payroll; a brunette with unspecified duties on the state-owned ENI or possibly the Socialist Party of Italy payroll; several personal political aides (he had added some three hundred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs payroll as opposed to the usual dozen); and a larger train of both diplomats and seconded military officers than any other attending Nato minister or uniformed potentate, including the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe – even though that exalted rank is much noted for the imperial magnitude of its escorting staff ...”

“... Communism is dead, socialism has been repudiated by the socialists themselves, fewer and fewer Europeans are believing Christians but it seems that a fanatical new religion – also practised in America – has replaced all of them: Central Bankism. Like all religions, it has both a supreme god – hard money – and a devil, inflation. Common sense suffices to oppose high inflation, and to fear hyper-inflation as the deadly disease of the currencies ...”

“... At the beginning of January, in the bookshop of Terminal 2 at San Francisco airport, I looked for a translation of the Iliad – not that I really expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music ...”

“... Even at the end of his new book, it’s not clear where Edward Luttwak is coming from, as they say in his country. He leaves no doubt, however, about where he dreads coming to. Instead of being smoothed through ‘the spotless elegance of Narita or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Singapore’, the hapless international traveller who comes into New York’s Kennedy Airport will walk into one of the tatty terminals that near-bankrupt airlines no longer maintain, mildly surprised at the naked plywood and unfinished gypsum board ...”

“... A man of deep culture and reading in many languages, Edward Luttwak has at least three major personae – strategist, journalist and scholar. His practical experience of contemporary policy and defence is reinforced by an almost professional knowledge of military history, particularly in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and he expounds his views in lively prose that gives maximum exposure to the most eccentric of them ...”

“... The power of central bankers – about which Edward Luttwak wrote in the LRB of 14 November – arises not just from their control over important aspects of economic policy, but also from the acceptance by the rest of us of what they may legitimately do in the exercise of this control. Until recently, our acceptance of the notion that central bankers should be committed to price stability has been entirely uncritical; and price stability (not low, but zero inflation) is what the European Central Bank will be required to maintain ...”

“... the process of justifying exceptions to the non-intervention doctrine, once begun, will stop. Edward Luttwak, a professional military adviser in Washington and an unabashed enthusiast for the use of American armed force in the world, offers here a rationalisation for intervention almost indistinguishable from older rationalisations for ...”

“... structural economic change. Such a combination is potentially deadly for political stability, as Edward Luttwak has noted (in a prescient piece in the LRB of 7 April). It exposes working people to a degree of economic insecurity that is wholly unprecedented in living memory, and by shattering the post-war social settlements of the major Western ...”

“... Herrnstein and Murray are part of the fin-de-siècle gloom movement whose adherents range from Edward Luttwak, writing powerfully in these pages on 7 April last year, to Jeremy Rifkin in The End of Work. From an abstract point of view – the vantage point of those who have high IQs and some idle time – Herrnstein and Murray have quite the neatest ...”

“... to snuff out a few hundred fanatics in a blasted desert holdout seems like overkill. In 1976 Edward Luttwak in The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire tried to explain it as a lesson to others contemplating revolt: ‘the Romans would pursue rebellion even to mountain tops in remote deserts to destroy its last vestiges regardless of cost.’ If ...”

“... State, whose affiliation with neo-conservatism and fanatical anti-Communism (their allies include Edward Luttwak, Michael Ledeen, Jeane Kirkpatrick, media legitimisers from George Will, William Safire, Patrick Buchanan and William Buckley to reporters like Shirley Christian and James Le Moyne, the editorial staff of the New Republic and Commentary, and ...”

“... consequence than in Russia. Unable to finance its commitments through exports and taxation, as Edward Luttwak explained in the last issue of the LRB, the Russian Government has had to borrow, issuing short-term bonds to domestic and international investors and, in principle at least, accepting the terms of the IMF. But it has also been unable to stop ...”

“... ago come to exercise such unquestioned dominance? I think the best base camp for this excursion is Edward Luttwak’s article ‘Why Fascism Is the Wave of the Future’, in the LRB of 7 April 1994. At the time, this essay, delivered in Luttwak’s inimitable style, at once torrential and precise, must have seemed ...”

“... common among Russianists in the universities, also enjoyed a good hearing in the media: Edward Luttwak and Thomas Friedman were not unrepresentative. Ranged against it was the camp of those who argued that Russia remained a dangerous potential foe, a semi-barbarous imperial power that would not readily change its spots, and should be fenced in ...”